Whether you’re a landlord letting a room or a bank deciding to approve a loan application, how can you know that your customers are who they say they are? To help companies ensure they work with trustworthy individuals, ThKeeper built an AI solution that provides unprecedented insight into the risk of doing business with customers.
“By harnessing the powerful in-built capabilities from IBM Cloud, we can devote more time to our core business.” - Joseph Remesar, CEO, ThKeeper
Business challenge
The rise of a more mobile population makes it more difficult for companies to protect themselves from untrustworthy individuals. ThKeeper knew that there must be a better way.
Transformation
Using IBM Watson APIs and IBM Cloud solutions, ThKeeper created an AI service that analyzes identity data to give businesses a reliable risk assessment of potential customers.
Results
10,000 clients expected within three months of launching the service
3 months to augment the service with AI capabilities
6 months saved by automating customization of user interfaces
Solution components
Watson Discovery
Business challenge story
Do you have all the facts?
Even in today’s hyper connected world, identity checks remain surprisingly unsophisticated – and it can be all too easy for crucial facts to slip under the radar. How much do companies really know about the people they do business with?
Joseph Remesar, CEO of ThKeeper, explains: “Say, for example, you run a bank. If a new customer wants to open an account, most likely you’ll ask them to show their passport or driver’s license and you’ll run a credit check. If the credit check comes back clean it seems promising, but it doesn’t give you the full picture. What if the customer has a good or non-existent credit history in your country, but abroad they previously filed for bankruptcy or left large debts unpaid? Do they still look like a good customer?
“The implications reach far beyond banking. What if you run a car hire company that rents a vehicle to someone with a seemingly clean record, but has racked up lots of points on their license in their home nation? To take another example, in the UK landlords are now responsible for ensuring that their tenants are in the country legally. But if you’re a landlord, you don’t just want to know your tenants’ immigration status – you want to see if they have a stable job, pay their taxes and have a bank account, so you can decide whether you trust them to look after your property.
“To help organizations make better-informed decisions about the people they work with, we set out to build a solution that doesn’t just verify a person’s identity but also determines the risk of doing business with them.”
Transformation
Identity checks that cover all bases
ThKeeper augmented its existing identity verification service with cognitive capabilities from IBM Watson Discovery to build a state-of-the-art AI identity management service. Both ThKeeper’s existing identity verification service and the new AI identity management offering run on IBM Cloud virtual servers.
So, how does it work? When a company wants to verify a person’s identity, they upload images of the passport, driver’s license or national identity card to ThKeeper’s mobile app: Jasoon. The company’s proprietary identity verification program cross-checks the person’s identity against 200 third-party databases in 192 countries, covering a total of 4.3 billion people. The databases reveal a person’s listed address, whether they pay taxes and whether they hold a criminal record. ThKeeper operates a three-way address matching service to help ensure accuracy.
ThKeeper created a cognitive search and content analytics engine built on IBM Watson to identify trends and patterns in data, extracting actionable insights that drive better decision-making. Using AI capabilities powered by IBM, Jasoon assigns key risk indicators, providing an assessment of the risk a customer poses to the business.
Joseph Remesar provides an example: “If a bank customer is asking for a loan, Jasoon can check the statistics of all clients who have asked for a similar loan and paid it back. It compares their profiles with the current client to calculate the risk of granting them a loan. And crucially, Jasoon can provide results in minutes, not days.”
To ensure compliance with data security regulations, ThKeeper’s service includes end-to-end encryption, and automatically deletes personal data after running the checks. If a client wants to keep the data, they must commit to doing so within the IBM Cloud and in compliance with GDPR regulations.
In the early days, ThKeeper spent weeks or months creating bespoke interfaces for each client or industry. Now, the company uses IBM Watson to detect each customer’s areas of interest and dynamically adapt the interface to match. IBM Watson can suggest further areas to explore – for example, if a company is looking to see how many women opened accounts in a city, the solution might offer a breakdown by age range or district. Additionally, IBM Watson observes how each user likes to view reports then presents findings in their preferred format, such as a spreadsheet or PDF.
Support from IBM and IBM Business Partner KnowNow Information has been a major factor in ThKeeper’s success. Joseph Remesar adds: ““IBM Cloud makes it easy for us to plug in APIs from IBM Watson and third parties to further enhance our identity risk management service. In addition, IBM Cloud offers excellent value for money and enables us to pay only for the resources we need. That’s essential for us as a start-up, because we need to remain lean.
“The IBM Watson APIs are surprisingly easy to use and if we do have questions the IBM team is always happy to help. Furthermore, we can always count on wonderful support from our longstanding partner KnowNow Information.”
Results story
Rapid time-to-market
ThKeeper’s AI identity management service offers a secure, fast method for organizations to verify the identities of people they work with – and assess the risk of doing business with them.
Joseph Remesar comments: “Organizations that run background checks manually often face a backlog of work, so it can take weeks for them to respond to an application. By comparison, IBM Watson can verify identities and deliver detailed risk assessments in 25 seconds. In a real-life example, that means a bank could enable customers to open accounts online in minutes, while keeping a tight hold on security and risk management.”
“Our AI identity management service is the first of its kind, and it has a vast number of potential use cases. For instance, security checks for workers on construction sites and people who visit venues such as stadiums. We expect to acquire 10,000 users within three months of launching.”
Jasoon is in beta testing, used by 75 users in 17 different countries. The app works anywhere, anytime and with any mobile network. IBM Cloud and IBM Watson solutions have played an essential role in bringing ThKeeper’s solutions to market.
Joseph Remesar concludes: “IBM Cloud helps us to develop rapidly. The tools that are now available mean that when you want to integrate a new service into your platform, about 75 percent of the coding effort has been done for you already. Last time it took seven months to build a production-ready app – now, we’re looking to build the prototype with IBM Watson in just three months.
“By harnessing the powerful in-built capabilities from IBM Cloud, we can devote more time to our core business. We are excited to use IBM Watson to take our solution to the next level.”
About ThKeeper
ThKeeper provides an artificial intelligence identity management service. The company is based in London, United Kingdom.
About Incede.ai
Incede.ai is the AI division of Locus Solutions, Inc.; harnessing the power of Data, AI and Machine Learning
With more than half of the world’s data in natural language, Incede.ai solves business problems and creates a competitive advantage by leveraging the power of Watson AI and machine learning.As thought leaders, we collaborate with stakeholders to deploy AI solutions that deliver real value.